Amazon announced more licenses for their Kindle Worlds fan fiction program, including GI Joe (from Hasbro); the TV shows Pretty Little Liars and Ravenswood (expanding their relationship with Warner’s Alloy Entertainment); and works from authors Markus Sakey and Theresa Ragan. The Seattle Times noticed an interesting restriction in Hasbro’s license. The Rhode-Island based company requires that “G.I. Joe’s comrade, Snake Eyes, cannot be a portrayed as a fan of the New York Yankees.” The paper takes a broader look at Amazon Publishing in connection with the announcement. The new non-specific statistic is Amazon Publishing head Jeff Belle saying that “the […]
Bestseller Radar
The Truth About 2013’s Top 100 Books: Not A Single, Self-Published Title
In today’s fragmented world of incomplete sales data — largely because we do not have any public disclosure of ebook unit sales on a title-level basis — USA Today’s annual list of the top 100 bestsellers performs a more important function than ever. That’s because they are the only compiler of bestseller lists to issue an annual chart that combines both ebook and print sales data from most major sellers. More particularly, their dataset includes Kindle sales but puts them in the context of the overall market, so you can differentiate between the storyline Amazon popularizes about what’s selling in […]
Nielsen’s 2013 Bestsellers Topped By O’Reilly, Brown and Kinney
Nielsen Bookscan’s lists of the bestselling books for 2013 were published at the end of last week, the trade’s comprehensive account of print book sales across what the company estimates is at least 80 percent of the print market. (There is still no public tracking service for ebook sales.) But direct comparisons about changes in print sales for the year are hard, because Bookscan expanded its data pool for 2013 by adding Wal-Mart sales. So total sales tracked expanded as Wal-Mart added between 5 and 10 percent to the total data pool. For year-over-year comparisons, there is the Bookscan’s subsection […]
Apple’s Top Picks and Bestsellers, Google’s Lists, and Kobo’s Favorites
Apple has named a short group of “best books” for the year, picking George Saunders‘ Tenth of December as their best work of fiction; Bill Bryson‘s One Summer as best nonfiction; Brandon Sanderson‘s The Rithmatist as best YA; and Breaking Bad as the best “made for iBooks” title. The iBookstore has more top 10 lists, across about 20 categories. In general fiction and literature, Apple’s top 10 is: Tenth of December, George Saunders The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt Someone, Alice McDermott Enon, Paul Harding Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid All That Is, […]
Amazon’s Many Bestseller Lists
As usual, Amazon has released a wealth of bestseller lists for the year. On their site they break out Top 100 lists of print books and ebooks for both adult titles as well as books for kids & teens. (The success of new adult and crossover YA makes that an increasingly hard distinction to draw.) Plus they announced top 20 lists that combine print and ebook sales. (Note that in all cases, Amazon counts only books newly-published in 2013 for these year-end lists.) Their top 20 adult books are: 1. Inferno by Dan Brown 2. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini […]
People, Awards, Etc.: Munro, Charkin, Levinson, Potter Postage, and More
Vintage is reprinting a total of 100,000 copies across their backlist of 14 story collections by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Random House Canada ceo Brad Martin told the Globe and Mail, “As far as we know, we have stock of all of Alice’s active titles,” though booksellers were light on copies and ran out quickly. Indigo placed “nice, substantial orders” for fresh inventory. You can read (or hear) Munro’s short phone call interview with the prize organizers here. She said in a written statement Thursday: “This is so surprising and wonderful. I am dazed by all the attention and affection that has […]